BITTERROOTS MOUNTAINS

 

An exhilarating dawn, after a "nuit historique"—the distant Bitterroots Mountains—the snow-capped Rockies. There, you either looked like a football player or a cowboy, and all the women remained hidden. Only in Bozeman did I see the limits of the world again. "The Wilsonian vision" I wrote on paper regarding the need to maintain an ideological global leadership of an anti-communist nature; the world under a more "realistic" American strategy. Nixon's resignation had aborted the strategy, and Gerald Ford proved fragile. Jimmy Carter was the political consequence of this strategic frustration, governing during the four most disastrous years of American global leadership. The Tetons of Wyoming, Granite Peak; the Rockies and the Bitterroots, and something resembling a distant glacier in northern Canada. It was like looking at the end of the world in Wyoming, in Arizona, in Texas before El Paso, in Oregon at Mevrill, and other points in the West. “The disruption of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy weakened America’s world position throughout the 1970: The Americans were defeated on every global stage. In Southeast Asia, defeat in Vietnam was followed by communist victory throughout Indochina, which concluded in 1974-1975. In South Asia, the United States lost control of the India-Pakistan conflict, and the Soviet Union allowed itself to invade Afghanistan in 1979. In the Middle East, they lost their main ally with the victory of the Iranian Revolution that same year; and they also had to endure the kidnapping of their diplomats at the same time that OPEC was inflicting a new "energy shock" on capitalist economies. In Africa, the failure of the developmentalist experiments of the first independent governments gave way to regimes that proclaimed themselves socialist, while the Soviet Union's military influence expanded in Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Dahomey, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Zaire. And even in Central America, civil wars multiplied in El Salvador and Guatemala, culminating in the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua,” I wrote. I rarely stopped talking about what I was writing, but, climbing the Rockies among mountain farms and sheep, talking was simply a means of inner deepening, or a technical experiment I conducted with my mind. I didn't consider any of my political ideas conditioned by ambition, or by the arriviste snobbery of which I was accused, seeing delirious secret motives in my "Theory of Elegance"... I simply sought to historically circumscribe eminences and distinguished people. Descending to Livington in the Yellowstone Valley; like the Plate Valley in Nebraska, like the Nile Valley, it is one of the great valleys of the world: in the empty, snowy expanses, the valley's trees stretch into infinity. The great sensation of distances from the North, in Canada, or in Wyoming, to the south and east to Dakota. A world of wildlands from Bigtimber to Denver. “At the end of the 1970s, the world was engulfed in a gigantic crisis and devoid of any kind of hegemony.”